We Can’t Make You Younger is a collaboration between the Belgian, Mexico City-based writer Benoît Loiseau and the Mexican, Mexico City-based artist Manuel Solano. The collaboration consists of three short stories written by Loiseau, which Solano has illustrated. Simply and directly written, the stories deal with fundamental issues, including loss, sexuality, romantic attachment and so-called spirituality.

At once timely and timeless, they contain a measured doseof references to popular culture. They are spare, understated and moving. At first blush, their general restraint might seem to be an odd counterpart for Solano’s messy and expressive finger painting, but as you work your way through the stories and encounter precisely which points he decides
to illustrate– repeating a phrase from the text seemingly plucked at random: a song lyric or the title of a book– the collaboration coheres with surprising and touching harmony, not to mention humour.

Why is this? I think it has something to do with the apparently aleatory quality of what Solano elects to illustrate, how it seems almost incidental, which creates a certain symmetry between the two approaches. This incidental-ness, for lack of a better word, operates in a variety of ways. First of all, it, the fact of illustrating Loiseau’s stories functions as a conceptual conceit, in so far as it becomes the machine which
generates the subject matter of the paintings. What is doubly interesting about this is while such a conceit would seem to excuse Solano from the onus of selecting subject matter, making it personal, it nevertheless is.

For although the subject matter of the paintings comes from the stories, these paintings are unmistakably Solano in terms of both form and content. I am thinking in particular how illustration of a song lyric, which is background music in the story, refers to Solano’s own interest in pop music and performing, and how, say, the depiction of the title 50 Shades (of Grey) is somehow queered in his work. This queering dovetails with the above-mentioned inciden-tal-ness in a complex, very particular way, in that it not only trivialises a given motif but it also deepens, makes it
more profound.

This procedure speaks to one of the most potent and moving characteristics of Solano’s work in general and here in particular: the miraculous co-existence of the pathos both in (finger painting) and behind the work– it will be remembered that this work is made by someone who lost his eyesight due to AIDS related complications– and the general levity and humour in its subject matter and how it is depicted (again, finger painting). Such contradictory tendencies are crucial to the crucible of Solano’s art. Never mind that these paintings are better, somehow more compelling, and quite frankly, more pictorially interesting than a fair amount of painting
I see in Mexico on a regular basis.

To end, I would like to say a word or two about the title–We Can’t Make You Younger. Blessedly devoid of the righteous, chest-beating evangelism to which some art is given, it is unlikely that Loiseau’s stories or Solano’s paintings are going to save you. But I am confident that they will both lighten and deepen the general ordeal and magic of living,
if you let them.

Chris Sharp (b. 1974, USA) is a writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, where he and the Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent run the project space Lulu.